Discussion (28) ¬

That’s a problem with being smart, experienced, confident, and so forth. You’re used to being able to solve a problem easily, so when you think you have a solution, you stop thinking.

And, inversely, that’s the virtue of being smart, inexperienced, overconfident, and so forth. You’re used to thinking of others as stupider than they are, so when you see them give up, you see it as a challenge.

Presumably the projector is running on its own battery. If it has 30 minutes of power and spent an effective 25 minutes in near-stasis back when it was inside its own field of effect, it still has 5 minutes and subjective millennia to run.

Hands stop shaking? that can’t be good. Give yourself a little rest, much as I want to see how this story turns out. Petrification (if they can find a way to not go crazy) is another option indeed. Can they do a mind meld like Greg and Kili did? Could Aki and Goro handle millenia of conversation? Would their daughter mature mentally if she had time to think on her own? Would Goro/Aki consider going into petrification status if their daughter wanted to stick it out on her own with Amy turning on once a year?

The crystal looks like it might have some substantial mass-it isn’t as thin as an arrow would be. And it was moving faster than the speed of sound when it exited the bubble, so it can’t have lost all its speed based on wind resistance. So tipping it over is possible. But there is a leg of the tripod base opposite the impact point, which I think makes it harder to tip. Kinetic energy could have been transformed into heat or mechanical energy to destroy the crystal. The question is, would conservation of momentum make the crystal shards flow past the sides of the field generator, or would it allow them to pile up against the side it impacted? Took physics over the summer, if you can’t tell…

It would still take years that they don’t have for it to fall over, or otherwise cause a failure, this field generator had had been running non-stop for a few centuries, while it was inside its own slow time bubble, sure, which means it was built to last and essentially brand new, also crystals tend to be exceptionally light weight, but strong so taking that into consideration, mass might not be enough, the shrapnel that will hit in .3 more years roughly, might hit the field projector though…

I don’t think I’d have the patience to wait for just one arrow… over 18 years, I’d have launched a few hundred things at the machine. Arrow might be the only effective one, but would likely be times I was wandering around, eating an apple or something, and hurled the apple core at it. Because why not?

The machine is outside the barrier, and is generating it. The barrier has SOME kind of “interface” to it. The last person to try crossing from a “fast” time to a “slow” time got his hand torn off by immense tidal forces. Not something any of these crew should attempt.

another possibility is that the pre-4th breaking people maybe didn’t see EMPs as being dangerous, or had safeguards in place in the event someone would use the time dilation field generator as a weapon, the victims could trigger something that would deactivate it remotely.